~ Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion

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Critical Religion: critical approaches to the study of religion

Critical Religion is a key marker of how we ‘do’ religion. Originating at the University of Stirling in Scotland, the term ‘critical religion’ seeks to describe two key approaches to thinking about religion:

following in part from ground-breaking work by Timothy Fitzgerald, Russ McCutcheon, Naomi Goldenberg, Talal Asad and others, we seek to understand what we are thinking about when we think about religion: for example, why has much of western culture identified one particular kind of ritual as ‘religious’ (such as baptism) whilst other kinds of ritual are seen as ‘secular’ (such as military parades). Not all cultures make these divisions, but the dominance of western cultural norms around the world from the colonial era onwards has impacted in profound ways on how people globally think about these issues.

‘critical religion’ as we pursue it also means more than this: we examine religion from a positive critical standpoint, with a view to showing how open to re-interpretation or re-conceptualisation the term ‘religion’ is today in our intellectual, social, and cultural spheres. We try to do this in ways that seek out and identify the limits of the language we employ (whether this be ‘religious language’ or language about ‘religion’ or ‘religions’ etc.), so that we can move beyond these limiting terms and concepts.

You will find a fuller discussion of how we interpret these ideas here.

Where can I study Critical Religion?

In the Scholars menu, the members of our Association are listed by institution. Research and teaching staff at some of the world’s leading academic institutions are part of the Critical Religion Association, and where appropriate, have included details of their work. There will also be, for some institutions, more detailed pages about postgraduate study. Postgraduate students who are working in this field are also included in these institutional contexts.

Please consult these pages to help you think about where you might want to study, and email the members of staff you are interested in communicating with about your studies.

Events

We have organised several public and academic events, and are in the process of arranging more. Details are here.

Questions…

We encourage you to contact us with any questions you might have about our work. Profile pages include contact details, and there is also a generic contact page.

About this site

About the blog

The Critical Religion blog is a shared (multi-author) blog.
The views represented are the personal views of individual authors and do not represent the position of the Critical Religion Association on any particular issue.

Copyright and Funding

Please note that all text and images on this site is protected by copyright law. Blog postings and profile texts are the copyright of their respective authors. We warmly welcome links to our site: each page/blog entry includes a variety of convenient sharing tools to help with this. For more information, see the note at the bottom of this page. Please do not reproduce texts in emails or on your own site unless you have express written permission to do so (if in doubt, please contact us). Thank you.

For a note about funding, see the information at the bottom of this page.

The CRA and the CRRG

The Critical Religion Association (this website) emerged from the work of the University of Stirling's Critical Religion Research Group created in early 2011. Interest in the CRRG grew beyond all expectations, and the staff at Stirling sought to address requests for involvement beyond Stirling by creating the CRA as an international scholarly association in November 2012. The CRRG passed on the blog and other key content to the CRA, and this is being developed here.
The CRRG website is now devoted exclusively to the scholarly work of the staff at the University of Stirling.

Critical Religion online

Apart from this website, the Critical Religion Research Group also has accounts elsewhere online:
- we are on Twitter;
- we are on Facebook;
- we have audio on Audioboo;
We will soon also offer video.